“A freewheeling crash course in media studies… the mysterious process by which a photograph conveys meaning and suggests how an iconic image relates some kind of historical parable. It’s heady stuff.”
– Tom Beer, Time Out NY

“Vivid thumbnails of the stories behind the pictures.”
– Matt Zoller Seitz, The New York Times

“Much more than the story of four photographs… It is also an exploration of the meaning and importance of photojournalism itself.”
– CBC News (Canada)

Q&A WITH PHOTOGRAPHER DAVID TURNLEY
AT THE WEDNESDAY, MAY 16, 8:00 SHOW

An icon was once a religious object, a sacred relic of a now-mythological event. Today’s icons are more often press images transmitted instantaneously, worldwide, to millions. LOOKING FOR AN ICON, a fascinating examination of four such images, includes the pointblank shooting of a Vietnamese at the height of the Vietnam War and a solitary Chinese student facing an onslaught of tanks rolling into Tiananmen Square. Photojournalists Eddie Adams, Charlie Cole, David Turnley and cultural critic David Levi Strauss analyze some of the 20th century’s most celebrated, infamous and disturbing images.

The Netherlands • 2005 • 55 minutes • In English

Photo credits (top to bottom): Anonymous, 1973, The New York Times; David Turnley, 1991, Black Star/Detroit Free Press; Eddie Adams, 1968, The Associated Press; Charlie Cole, 1989, Newsweek

“Evocative. An elegiac love letter to the fallen revolutionary
and his bygone era in Latin American politics.”
– Filmmaker Magazine

"Visually exquisite and deeply moving... at once an elegy to the passing of the age of revolution in Latin America and an investigation into the history and mythos surrounding the infamous photograph of the beatific corpse of its central icon: Che Guevara."
– Jeffrey Skoller, Afterimage

"Like a police investigator, Leandro Katz draws out all the circumstances of the photo's making and puts the photo into a powerful... temporal pan-Latin intellectual context... open(ing) up the full horror of Che's death and disappearance."
– John Hess, Jump Cut

In THE DAY YOU’LL LOVE ME Leandro Katz deconstructs Freddy Alborta’s photo of Che Guevara’s cadaver, with its open eyes, surrounded by Bolivian military men (John Berger has compared it to Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Professor Tulp). Photographer and filmmaker consider why this image is so resonant, how it has contributed to Che’s myth, and the power of photography to evoke profound feelings of love, loss and sorrow.

US • 1998 • 30 minutes
In English & Spanish with English subtitles

Program is a First Run/Icarus Films Release

Available at Amazon:

THINGS AS THEY ARE:
Photojournalism in Context Since 1955
by Mary Panzer and Christian Caujolle